The Near-Death Experience

One way to know is to listen to what people who have almost died have to
say about their near-death experience (NDE). In the early 1970s, an
American doctor and philosopher named Raymond Moody began collecting
accounts of NDEs as part of his clinical practice. It was in 1975 that his
ground-breaking book Life After Life was published. It was a
simple book but dramatic in its impact. It was no more than a compilation
of accounts from people who has come close to death and lived to tell the
tale. Many had had cardiac arrests and been resuscitated, though some had
had their close encounters through other, less medically demanding means.
All of them, however, described similar experiences, which enabled Moody to
produce his now famous composite account:

A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress,
he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an
uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels
himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he
suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the
immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance,
as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from
his unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.

After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd
condition. He notices that he still has a "body," but one of a very
different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he
has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet
and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who
have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never
encountered before -- a being of light -- appears before him. This being
asks him a question, non-verbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps
him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major
events of his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort
of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly
life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth,
that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists,
for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does
not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love
and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his
physical body and lives.

Later he tries to tell others but he has trouble doing so. In the first
place, he can find no human words adequate to describe these unearthly
episodes. He also finds that others scoff, so he stops telling other
people. Still, the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his
views about death and its relationship to life.

Of course, not all the accounts in Moody's book fitted this formula
precisely. Some were much shorter and included fewer elements. Others
seemed to dwell on some parts of the experience to the exclusion of others.
Nevertheless, the pattern was clear and the similarity obvious.

At the time there was something of an outcry from other doctors and from
psychologists and physiologists. This was all too fanciful, they said;
after all, the experiences were just hallucinations. Some critics claimed
they could not be proved or they were invented or exaggerated. Others
said they were just products of Western peoples' expectations. This last
argument is important. Moody was claiming far more than the simple fact
that a lot of Americans being resuscitated from cardiac arrests had had
similar experiences. He was claiming, or at least strongly implying,
that the experience he outlined so graphically was common to all human
beings; that this is what happens when we die and it is relevant to every
one of us.

If this is really true we should expect NDEs to be substantially the same
the world over. There are at least three ways of looking at this:
the historical, the cross-cultural and the developmental. Have people
always reported these experiences throughout the ages or are they just a
twentieth-century phenomenon? Do they occur in other cultures or are they
a product of Western education, religion or medicine? Are they the same
in children who have had less chance to take on religious and cultural
expectations?

Susan Blackmore (1993) reviews briefly the available evidence from myths,
medieval manuscripts, cross-cultural, and developmental studies and reaches
the following conclusion:

There is consistency but not invariance. Yes, the NDE is universal in the
sense that something like the modern NDE has been reported in adults and
children and in many ages and cultures. And 'no,' it is not always the
same but varies with the individual, the culture and the circumstances.

Moody, from his collection of accounts, has made several lists of the
typical features of the NDE. In his first book (1975) he lists fifteen
aspects of the NDE:

Ineffability (or being impossible to describe)

Hearing the news

Feelings of peace and quiet

The noise

The dark tunnel

Going out of the body (usually known as an out-of-body
experience or OBE)

Meeting others

The review

The border or limit

Coming back

Telling others

The effects on people's lives

New views of death

Corroboration

This list was derived by Moody directly from the accounts. Moody makes it
clear that his is not a 'scientific' analysis, his sampling is not random
and he provided only a collection of cases as he found them...

The order of these elements is important. [...] It was Kenneth Ring (1980)
who carried out the the first systematic investigation of whether there is
an orderly progression of these experiences. Ring is a psychologist at the
University of Connecticut who was much impressed by Moody's findings and
wanted to investigate the many unanswered questions. In 1977 he began to
collect accounts systematically from adults who had come close to death
through serious illness, accident or suicide attempt and who were recovered
enough to be able to talk about it. There was no stipulation that they had
to have had any 'experiences.'

Insufficient number of such people could be found through hospital referrals
alone, but finally, through advertising and word of mouth, 102 people were
included in the study. Of these, the vast majority were white and Christian.
Half had nearly died as a result of a serious illness, about a quarter from
accidents and the remainder from suicide attempts.

To many critics' surprise the interviews confirmed most of Moody's claims.
Similar experiences were reported and Ring was able to describe what he
called the 'Core Experience.' This consisted of five core features rather
than Moody's fifteen:

Feeling of peace (60%)

Body separation (the OBE; 37%)

Entering the darkness (Moody's dark tunnel; 23%)

Seeing the light (16%)

Entering the light (10%)

Using this categorization it became clear that not only do these features
usually occur in the above order, but that the earlier ones in the sequence
are the most common. This is shown by the percentages in the parentheses
above. A solid 60 per cent of Ring's sample reported peace but only 10 per
cent had an experience of entering the light. [...]
So, Ring had apparently confirmed Moody's claim about the depth of the NDE.